Grifter-Illogic at Baalbek

This visualisation ( © 2009, Dennis R. Holloway Architect) perfectly captures the
setting of these Three Big Stones and the logicality of their siting.

 
The "classical history graduate" YouTuber Mike Button has a new video, this one replaying all the old talking points about Baalbek, Lebanon ("Archaeologists Can’t Solve this Engineering Mystery", Nov 23, 2025). 

At the base of one of Rome's largest temples is a foundation that doesn't make sense. Three stone blocks each weighing 800 tons set seven meters above the ground. This site holds one of the most baffling engineering mysteries in ancient history and the deeper you look the stranger it gets [...] [bla bla]....

Another visualisation of the position of the Three Big Stones
( © 2009, Dennis R. Holloway Architect).

Instead of asking an engineer to "solve the mystery" of these big stones in the front of the western facade of the podium of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Heliopolitanus [note the suffixes of the name], he taunts archaeologists that he's found something he assumes they cant explain (but he actually ignores texts that do try to address the problem to avoid having to address the points made). He plumps for the Ancient Sea Kings, the Allerod Antecedant Civilization mythology as an explanation.

I thought I'd challenge him to defend that, by proposing an alternative explanation of my own as a comment under the YouTube video using his own logic (of ignoring "what the archaeologists say", faked incredulity, speculative "what-ifism", and cherry-picking). Let us see the results of him engaging with it. Will he?:

@PortAntissues 18 hours ago
I don’t know if there is a unit on logic in the “ancient history” course at Milton Keynes Agricultural College (or wherever you studied), but your thinking is not at all logical here. Bonkers.

You question the Roman date of archaeologists of the course of stones with the so-called “trilithon” (why do you call it that? They lie flat and NOT in the form of a trilithon). Yet you have no problems in accepting the same archaeologists’ Roman date for the structures above. By your own “logic”, they only “look like” a Roman temple. There may be Roman finds in the soil dumped around them, but that material is a terminus post quem for the layers themselves.

As for the style, we all know that throughout history people have been building ”Roman”-looking architecture [often reusing ancient elements – spolia]. A prime example is the ninth century Palace of Charlemagne in Aachen. The same goes for the Renaissance, Baroque and Roccoco buildings that ape the same basic classical forms and utilize classical elements, Neoclassical architecture (enlightenment to present day – with Donald Trump mandating that even today it’s the ONLY permissible style for public buildings in the USA).

So how do you “know” that the overlying elements are Roman – making the placement of the stones pre-Roman (and then on that base postulating an imaginary “lost civilization”).

If you are proposing alternative (contrarian) interpretations, why are you simply dismissing out of hand that the “Roman temple” above these stones could have been built closely-copying Roman style significantly LATER than the end of classical antiquity? Famously, it is ISLAMIC sources that speak of how stones were moved by "levitation" when building monuments like the pyramids. The Black Stone of the Kaaba was lifted by the clans on cloths, reportedly legends refer to a "magical papyrus" that was placed under some of the heavier stones; when the stones were struck with a metal rod, they would begin to float.

Why are you ignoring the fact that the three big stones of Baalbek (equivalent to the three jamarāt, in the city of Mina – devils = Baal?) COULD have been moved there and set on a raised foundation in early Islamic times, and then a building erected over them in archaizing style to give the impression that they and that foundation below them were older than they are? This may have been part of a sequence of local legends that are now lost. Prove it was not.

WHY did you not examine this hypothesis before simply ignoring it and plumping from one involving an imaginary lost/missing ancient Allerød Antecedant Civilization and thus misleading your viewers on the grounds “I have a degree in ancient history”, as if that gave anything at all compared to a solid grounding in archaeology? 😸😼

And I'll accompany this with a composite screenshot from Google Earth that reveals that what I said about Mecca checks out. The foundation wall below these three big blocks is aligned, actually, pretty precisely, on Mecca. Really. 

So, is his is an HONEST attempt to deconstrruct the Roman building-history of this complex, he needs to address the elephant in the room, that other deconstructions can exist - and until he produces actual evidence and cogent arguments, they are equally valid (and at the same time invaliddate his randomly-preferred "explanation"). 

For the record, I am personally convinced they are the same date as the rest of that wall of the podium and that, together with the bit of wall beneath them, was constructed in Roman times (see also World of Antiquity [David Miano] "Baalbek: Mystery of the Trilithon Stones" Apr 6, 2020).

A question we do not see being asked is (since the Three Big Stones form a logical whole in the  temple podium), what could have been the intended destination of the other two stones left in the quarry?